I didn’t answer him right away. I walked to the kitchen and put the kettle on, even though I didn’t want any tea. I needed something to do with my hands. The kitchen felt different with him standing in it. It felt small and crowded. I remembered when he brought Camille home for the first time, when she was just a baby with bright eyes and a laugh that sounded like bells.

“You’re just punishing her because you don’t know how to talk to her,” I said. It came out softer than I intended.

Randall stopped pacing. He didn’t yell. He just looked at the wall, at the framed photograph of his father that had hung there for twenty years. “I tried talking, Mom. I tried everything. This is about keeping her alive.”

He didn’t wait for me to sign. He left the folder on my counter and went out to the porch to finish his cigarette. I sat there with the papers spread out in front of me. They were filled with fine print about protocols and phone restrictions and zero-contact policies. It read like a manual for a prison.

I thought about the spare room upstairs. It was still painted the soft yellow I chose when Camille was six and wanted to pretend she was a princess. Her books were still on the shelves. Her old stuffed rabbit was sitting on the pillow, waiting for a hug that hadn’t happened in months.

The silence in the house started to feel heavy, like a physical weight pressing down on my shoulders. I felt the pull of the past, the way I had always tried to bridge the gaps between my children. But this wasn’t a gap. It was a canyon.

I walked to the window. Camille was staring out at the trees. She looked so much like her mother did at that age. My heart felt like it was breaking in two different directions. One side wanted to believe Randall, to trust the system he was paying for, to believe that distance would act like a cauterizing agent for her wounds. The other side heard the hitch in her breath on the phone, the raw, terrified honesty of a girl who just wanted to be held.

I remembered something my own mother told me once. She said that love isn’t about doing what works. It’s about doing what stays.

I went to the front door and pushed it open. The air was crisp, smelling of damp earth and the coming winter. Randall looked up from his phone.

“I’ve made up my mind,” I said.

He stood up, his face hopeful for just a second. “Good. You’re doing the right thing.”

I didn’t say anything. I just handed the folder back to him, unsigned. The look on his face shifted from relief to a kind of cold, hard shock. It was like he was looking at a stranger.

“You’re choosing her over me,” he said.